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Re: Radio "limbo"

Rob Robinett
 

With any kind of decent antenna and a reasonably quiet site, the Kiwi needs 10+ dB gain to get signals above 10 MHz to be stronger than the internal noise of the Kiwi RF amplifier.
Of course that 10 dB gain makes Kiwi ADC overloads from local AM broadcast stations even more common, so you need an AM blocking filter ahead of the LNA.
The $16 Nooelec Flamingo AMBF (https://www.nooelec.com/store/flamingo-am.html) is enough for several of my receive sites, but you could very well need even more filtering than the 20-35 dB it provides. 
Every 10 minutes WD logs overload events to files /tmp/wsprdaemon/..../ov.log where you can learn about OVs which happen when you aren't looking at the Kiwi's S-meter.

On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 12:02 PM Bruce KX4AZ <bruce@...> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 11:16 AM, Rolf Ekstrand wrote:
 
...see you got your Kiwi WD up and running and doing well.  What antenna(s) are you using on the RX site?     

73  Rolf
Rolf,
Currently I have one antenna for the KX4AZ/T WD site - a random wire dipole that is resonant at about 3.4 MHz, roughly 15 feet above ground level.  I am still tweaking the matching/feedline setup, using Cat 7 ethernet cable as a balanced feedline.  Earlier today I added an LNA to the KiwiSDR input which boosted the WSPR performance significantly, but I am positive that will lead to overloading later today - will need to adjust the gain.  But I am certainly having a lot of fun learning & experimenting with this new setup.
Bruce



--
Rob Robinett
AI6VN
mobile: +1 650 218 8896
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